File 7.643-Vibe Town {dropped}

Chapter 1: Confusion

I finished reading the File. I stood there, bewildered. "The heck..?", I murmured to myself in the empty light pink room. A large door stood intimidatingly behind me. I spun around. I felt a bit dizzy. My memory felt like a dream that I could barely grasp. Then I realized. What is my name? Maybe I'll remember if I... I stumble to the door and twist the handle.

A blast of color greets me like a flurry of wind. However, I'm not outside or even in the open air. There are glass walls around me and a comfortable atmosphere, nothing like the small room I just walked out of. I stand there, taking it in. "Oh?", I say quietly. I see a booklet on the table in the middle of the greenhouse. I pick it up. Same thing as before, but at the bottom it says,'Open the door on the left'. I saw a pink button the size of a fly on the wall. Slowly, I walk over, eyeing it.

I press it and a door opens. A sign on the wall says,'Pick a pet!'. A catalog with animals in colors I've never seen before are scattered across the cover. I remember my favorite animal, a fox. Maybe the pieces of my life will slowly come back together. I push away the thought. I flip to F in the book. Fox. I see them in every color. I tap on an amber one, the ones you see in books.

"What would you like to name your animal of choice?" A keyboard appears on the screen. My fingers move to type in the name," J U N I P E R", but my muscle memory makes my fingers move to other letters. I don't type in the name Juniper, but the name that is on the screen is something very familiar. 'Sam'. Huh. Suddenly it comes back to me. That's my name! I smile slightly, then delete the letters and type in Juniper. A small box slides out of a hole from who knows where right in front of me. I open the top flaps and an orange blur hops out and runs across the white tile floor. She stares up at me, but there is something unnatural about it.

Since there isn't anything else to do in the room, I walk back out into the main greenhouse, Juniper right behind me. The large glass windows look out over a green hill and I can make out some sort of village residing a little further from the base of it. I feel my stomach growl. Food. I see a large door that seems to lead outside. There isn't anywhere else to go, so that must be where some food is, right?

A large fence surrounds the building and there is room to walk around. A stone path leads to another building in the distance. Juniper hops after me. Oh yeah, the Vibey Inn. They probably have food there, but where is it? I'm still clutching the brochure in my hand. A map on the back has a big red dot. Assuming that was the Inn, I headed over to it.

It was quite a long walk, and Juniper was getting tired, too. I picked her up halfway through, she's light and small.

The Vibey Inn isn't like what I pictured, but nothing here is like anything I've seen before. It was quaint. Made of mossy brick and a thatched roof, it looked about the size of a bathroom. Inside, it was much, much bigger. Juniper's tail was wagging so I assumed there was food somewhere around here. I feel something in my pocket that I hadn't noticed before. I reached in and took it out. It looked like a wand. A small screen with the number 24 was on it. Was I number 24? Could I do 24 spells with this? Then I remembered the welcome sheet I had. This must be the number of vibes I can give out every day! I smiled, glad that I started to adjust to this strange setting. I feel my stomach growling again, reminding me to get some food.

I walk inside to what looks like the check-in desk. The walls are wooden and dark, and the floor is a blue carpet. The light shines in from an unknown source. I step forward and talk to the woman at the counter. She looks very plain like I won't remember her. "Hey, uh, I was told to come here," I say.

"Oh, you're a newcomer! Welcome to the Vibey Inn. You're probably flustered, so I'll just give you the room key, and send you on your way.", she says and hands me a small rusted key with the number 4 on it. I stop and ask her where the food is and she tells me down the hall on the right. "Hey, so are there other people living here? There must be other rooms before 4, right?" I ask.